First published: Kazaki, 1863 (English translation, 1878)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Nineteenth century

Locale: The Caucasus

The Story:

Olyenin, a young Russian aristocrat, decides to leave the society of Moscow and enter the army as a junior officer for service in the Caucasus. There are a number of reasons for his decision. He squandered a large part of his estate, he is bored with what he considers an empty life, and he is in some embarrassment because of a love affair in which he could not reciprocate the woman’s love.

Olyenin leaves the city after a farewell party one cold, wintry night. He and his servant, Vanyusha, travel steadily southward toward the Caucasus, land of the Cossacks. The farther Olyenin goes on his journey the better he feels about the new life he is about to begin. In a year’s service, he sees the opportunity to save money, to rearrange his philosophy, and to escape from a mental state that does not permit him to love. He is sure that in a new environment he can become less egocentric and can learn to love others as he loves himself.

Shortly after he joins his unit, he is one of a force sent out along the Terek River to guard against depredations by the tribes who live in the mountains and on the steppes south of the river. The troops are to reinforce the Cossacks who live in the narrow strip of verdant land that borders the river. Olyenin’s unit is stationed in the village of Novomlin, a small settlement of houses and farms with a population of less than two thousand people, mainly Cossacks.

The Cossack men spend their time in hunting and standing guard at posts along the Terek River, while the women tend the homes and farms. When Olyenin’s unit moves into the village, he, as an aristocrat, is not assigned duties with the troops, and so his time is largely his own. The Cossacks do not like the Russian troops, for the tensions of differing cultures and the years of enmity between them are not assuaged. Olyenin is quartered in the house of a Cossack ensign and soon learns that he is not welcome. They are accepting him and his servant only because the household has to take them.

In the house lives an ensign, his wife, and their daughter Maryanka. Maryanka is spoken for in marriage by a young Cossack, Lukashka, a hero in his village because he saved a boy from death by drowning and killed a mountain tribesman who attempted to swim across the river during a raid. Olyenin quickly becomes infatuated with Maryanka. He does not know how to act in her presence, however, because he is bewildered by the possibility of a love affair between himself and the young, uncultured Cossack.

Olyenin makes friends with Lukashka, whom he meets at an outpost while hunting, and Uncle Yeroshka, an old Cossack whose days of service are over. In Yeroshka’s company, Olyenin goes hunting almost every day. He dislikes drinking bouts, gambling at cards with the other officers, and the pleasure they find in pursuing the women of the village whose husbands and sweethearts are away on duty. Olyenin is happier alone or hunting with Yeroshka in the woods along the Terek, where he tries to work out his emotional problems.

At last, Olyenin begins to feel that he can be happy through generosity to others. He discovers that he enjoys giving a horse to Lukashka and presenting old Yeroshka with small gifts that mean little to Olyenin but a great deal to the old man. In addition, Olyenin wins the respect of the Cossacks by his ability to shoot pheasants on the wing, a new feat to the Cossacks, who never before saw it done.

As time passes, Olyenin becomes more and more aware of Maryanka’s presence. When her parents announce that she is formally engaged to Lukashka, the announcement makes Olyenin decide that he, too, is really in love with her. He turns over in his mind the possibilities that such a love would entail. He cannot imagine taking her back to Moscow, into the society to which he was expected to return after his tour of duty, nor can he imagine settling down for life in the Cossack village. Although his stay there means a great deal to him, he knows that he can never be happy following the primitive life he sees there, for he has too many ties, both social and material, in the world he temporarily left.

While Olyenin helps Maryanka pick grapes in the vineyards, he has an opportunity to declare his love. Maryanka neither becomes angry nor repulses him, although she gives him little encouragement. Later Olyenin, able to press his suit at various times, promises to marry the Cossack woman. She, on her part, refuses to say that she will marry him, for she, too, realizes the difficulties of such a marriage. Unlike most of the Cossack women, she is not free with her favors and refuses to let either Olyenin or Lukashka share her bed. Lukashka is well aware of what is happening but is not worried; he believes that the situation will right itself because he is the better man.

One day a small band of marauders from across the Terek appear a short distance from the village. When the Cossacks, accompanied by Olyenin, make a sortie against them, the outlaws tie themselves together so that they cannot run away while they make a stand against the Cossacks. After the battle, Lukashka, wounded by a gunshot, is carried back to the village, where it is discovered that he cannot recover from his wound. Faced with the death of the man her parents chose to be her husband, Maryanka realizes that her life and her people are widely separated from Olyenin and the culture for which he stands. Deciding that she can never have any lasting affection for the Russian, she tells Olyenin bluntly of her decision. Olyenin requests a change of duty to another unit. After permission for the transfer is granted, he and his servant leave the village and the kind of life he can never learn to accept.

Critical Evaluation:

The character of Olyenin, the hero of The Cossacks, is largely autobiographical in origin. Like his young hero, Leo Tolstoy left Moscow in 1852 and joined an army regiment stationed in the Caucasus, the land of the Cossacks. Throughout his four years of service—during which he fought in expeditions in the Caucasus, the Danube, and the Crimea—Tolstoy kept very careful, detailed diaries, which years later were to provide invaluable material for his fiction. In the Caucasus diaries, he recorded all aspects of his life as a soldier, including not only the fighting but also the hunting and the drinking, the time spent reading and writing, and the periods of idleness and boredom. It is to this minute observation and recording of firsthand experience that The Cossacks owes much of its verisimilitude of plot and setting, its vividness of atmosphere and impression. In addition to using his army experiences in molding the character of Olyenin, Tolstoy provided his hero with a background nearly identical to his own; both Olyenin and his creator were young noblemen who left Moscow as a result of large debts and an unsuccessful love affair, and both were concerned with discovering new values amid a different way of life from that to which they were accustomed.

This escape from life in a teeming city, with its juxtaposition of culture and decadence, attractiveness and corruption, creativeness and stagnation, is at the thematic center of The Cossacks. The novel revolves around the concern for humanity’s return to a more natural state from the debilitating influences of urban civilization. This idea is embodied in Olyenin’s flight from the whirl of Moscow society to the Caucasus. The important question to be answered, however, is what Tolstoy does with the nature-versus-civilization hypothesis. Certainly, in the first chapters, it would appear that the hero is headed toward an environment that will heal and renew him. However, the extent to which the remaining course of the narrative proves the Caucasus to be the natural life that Olyenin is seeking remains in question.

Tolstoy is able to see both strengths and shortcomings in each way of life and condemns neither one. One illustration of his objectivity is seen in his characterization of old Yeroshka, who, if this novel were a polemic against civilization, would be the obvious candidate to represent Cossack wisdom and the superiority of the Cossack way of life. Instead, he is portrayed as a brave hunter and fighter but a fault-ridden and quite human individual; he is a lovable, if slightly lecherous old reprobate. Rather than dispensing profound insight and ancient wisdom to young Olyenin, Yeroshka simply rides, hunts, drinks, and encourages the youth to enjoy sensual pleasures without worrying about the future. Likewise, the other main Cossack figure, Lukashka, combines strength and virtue, weakness and pettiness. Yeroshka, Lukashka, and their people are admirable in their bravery, their energy, and their closeness to the land; yet at the same time they murder, steal, and lose themselves in drunkenness and debauchery.

In the same way, Tolstoy attacks all the evils of his own and his hero’s class: idleness, selfishness, shortsightedness, hypocrisy, temper, and irresponsibility. Although he sees these vices in the nobility and includes many of them in Olyenin’s personality, he does not lose sight of redeeming qualities in the aristocracy. Olyenin’s merit lies in his basic morality, which will not allow him to be complacent about his weaknesses; he is dissatisfied with his faults and his former way of life and seeks, although in an imperfect fashion, to find remedies and to grow as a person.

Olyenin vacillates throughout the story in his opinion of what comprises happiness. In chapter 20, he exclaims to himself, “Happiness consists in living for others,” while, in chapter 33, he is convinced that “Self-renunciation is all stuff and nonsense . . . in my heart there is nothing but love for myself and the desire to love her and live her life with her.” Olyenin never finds the key to happiness throughout the novel, although he enjoys a brief period of unreflecting enjoyment with the Cossacks, but he does discover that the urban, aristocratic way of life and the Cossack culture are incompatible. He learns this lesson on the personal level when his attempt to form a relationship with Maryanka fails and on a more general level when he is unable ever to feel truly a part of Cossack culture.

In addition to the cohesiveness that Olyenin’s search for happiness gives The Cossacks, the novel is strongly unified through its richly evocative descriptive passages. In a powerful style marked by its clarity and simplicity, Tolstoy paints an unforgettable picture of Cossack life and of the people who cultivate the land. In this early work, all the author’s love of nature, farming, and country life emerges in scenes of riding, hunting, and harvesting to create a vividness of effect that foreshadows the genius of his later novels.

Tolstoy conceived the idea of writing The Cossacks in 1852, although it took him ten years of intermittent work to complete the novel. The basic idea for the work was inspired by the author’s long talks with an old Cossack friend, Epishka. Tolstoy’s projected plan, first jotted down in a brief diary entry, was for a story “(a) about hunting, (b) about the old way of life of the Cossacks, and (c) about his expeditions in the mountains.” Tolstoy’s original intention was to write a long and complex novel that would include a substantial background of Cossack history, faithful renditions of the folk customs of the Caucasus, and all the tales of the area told to him by Epishka. As it transpired, however, Tolstoy was forced, for financial reasons, to finish the novel hastily for a publication deadline in 1863; the final length was approximately two hundred pages, since much of the original plan for the work had either been altered over the years or sacrificed in the hurry to complete it. The Cossacks is therefore a work of many peculiarities of structure and style; nevertheless, it marks an important step in Tolstoy’s development, being his first work to be translated into another language and to capture an enthusiastic audience abroad. Above all, it remains an unsurpassed description of Cossack life and an excellent psychological study of a young man casting about for values that will fill the moral void he fears has entered his life.

Further Reading